6/24 Can't Sleep; Tokyo

I am literally so excited I feel like I am vibrating.

I was gonna write a "part 2" on the finals/goodbyes theme, but that will have to wait, because I don't know my grades and also holy crap everyone I am going to Harajuku asdklalsjdafjk

I've compiled a bunch of maps and guides on my desktop so I don't have to scrounge for internet in order to get where I want to go. Other than that, I can't be too responsible at the moment, because asldalsjdasdjalk HARAJUKU

THE PLACE I WROTE MY SENIOR PAPER ABOUT

I DRESSED UP SO MANY SEDONA GIRLS IN JAPANESE FASHION, JUST WAITING FOR THIS DAY

I AM GOING TO BE THERE PHYSICALLY WANDERING AROUND

I can't internalize this. If I did, I would explode. I would just tear myself to ribbons out of sheer happiness.

THIS, ladies and gentlemen, is the climax of the story! Gonna wear the hell out of my new used Sex Pot Revenge jacketshirtthing that I got for 2500 yen, and my hair will look stupid, and I will not care one dram about it.

One day, I'll come back with more than 20,000 yen to spend. And then, O dear readers, you will all tremble in awe and fear of my epic clothinz.

What I'll do is, I'll pack two outfits and that is all, and each day I will buy the one I'll wear the next day. BUT ENOUGH FUTURE DREAMS

Er, tomorrow is in the future, but that's allowed

HARAJUKU YOU GUYS

THE ONE GWEN STEFANI THOUGHT SHE COULD CONDENSE INTO ONE GENERIC AMERICAN-STYLE CLOTHING LINE

Maybe you'll get a coherent post out of me in LA. For now, goodnight.

-Vic

6/21 - Finals and Farewells (the First)

Guh, hi.

Ladies and gentlestalkers, we must all sacrifice some things in life to obtain happiness. For many, it's wealth, for others, freedom: for me, it's my GPA.

So, finals are afoot once again in the Land of the Rising Sun... as you can imagine, I'm terminally unenthused, not only for the whole sucking-at-tests-because-none-of-anything-made-sense thing, but also for leaving Japan. Boo hoo poor me. On the upside, that means I get Friday to myself, and Saturday in Tokyo with horrible plane hair. yey -u-

I've also got a ton of pictures from... jeez, what have I even done lately... Karaoke didn't happen, but the Mazda factory and the Peace Park did. INCOMING SOMBER MOOD

The Mazda factory was pretty awesome. Probably more so if you like cars. For my part, I commented about the fact that mechanics in Japan are so much prettier than in America, and then proceeded to make a lot of Rihanna-grade car puns.

As for the Peace Park... whoa. Where to begin. We walked around to a bunch of the memorial stones in the park, and then toured the museum, the first part of which was a lot of This Is Hiroshima's History And How A-Bombs Work, and the second part of which housed things recovered from the irradiated city; children's school uniforms, workers' lunchboxes with the food inside scorched black, parts of buildings and the bodies of people mutilated by the bomb. My photo gallery still needs editing, is what I'm saying.

Then I had to write five pages, and so the somber mood persisted >_>

Oh, and I did a presentation! For my conversation class, which is the best class. Takada-sensei, I'll miss you! You and your snails!

Now, conserving funds for Tokyo. Oh yay. Also, more finals. Talk to y'all later... also, photo updates are impending~ (Edit: RATHER THEY ARE DONE)

-Vic

6/14 - The Big Week-Spanning Blog Entry.

It is neither morning nor Sunday at the moment, but I'm posting now, of all times...

Jeez. An entry like this needs an outline and a couple of drafts, but I suppose I'll wing it, the way I do everything else.

Where did I leave off? Last Monday? The baseball game, right?

So, last Monday we got to see the Hiroshima Toyo Carp play the Softbank Hawks, and lose humiliatingly, even as the unsinkable fans cheered for them to do their best. It was so sad, and so cute. Before that, though, we all got to meet Dennis Sarfate, an ex-ASU-student himself, and I had the pleasure of realizing that my "all my red clothes are dirty but at least the colors are coordinated" outfit was black and yellow, as were the Hawks... needless to say I felt like quite the tool sitting in the Carp cheering section.

NOBODY TOLD ME. ><

Anyway, yeah, they lost 17 to 2, but as I am a goth kid that didn't matter, considering I was engrossed in the shrimp and salmon sushi bowl I'd acquired earlier for like 200 yen, in addition to other comestibles (including but not limited to a drink that was sold frozen, like an ice pack. It was so hot there, so out of an almost Native-American sense of gratitude to inanimate objects, I took its photo, which can be accessed from the photos page, which is a thing now). Besides, the fans were so awesome. Americans would've got up and left around the fourth inning of a game like that. Not these guys. The lead ouen-dan guy stood up and gave an inspiring ninth-inning speech, none of which I could understand firsthand, but which boiled down to "even though we're getting just mercilessly slaughtered out there, let's put our best foot forward for the last inning, right, guys?" D'awwww. It reminded me of my attitude towards the kanji tests in my 300-levels. :3 Also, I got a ridiculawesome souvenir for my dad that I'm kind of hoping he lets me keep, lol. It's just /so awesome/.

Wednesday (the next day I didn't spend cooped up in my room doing homework and taking naps, which are a new and strange phenomenon to me), we went to visit a Japanese elementary school, and spend a day with a sixth grade class. They split us all up into groups of two or three, had us make posters about Arizona to present to the class that day, and sent each group to a different sixth-grade classroom.

It is important to note here that American sixth graders are, without exception, intolerable, unenthusiastic brats who think they're too cool for every last thing anyone should dare suggest they try (I know this because I was one once, and my siblings, with the exception of the fifth-grader, were too). Japanese sixth-graders, however, are so cute. If we'd had a guest-speaker day in my sixth-grade class, every last student would have been all, cool, so we can doodle and pass notes and generally be jerks all day, and we won't have homework either. If the guest-speaker in question happened to suck at English, that would be extra-super-boring to us, and we would probably snicker at him and teach him to say things wrong. THESE KIDS, on the other hand, were just freakin' thrilled to see us, and they had so many questions about America and what it's like to live somewhere where there's no ocean, and what we got in our school lunches if not fish with their heads still on. Also, they clean their classrooms every day. Dear siblings, your lives aren't that hard. As for my sixth-graders, they and I helped to clean the first-graders' classroom. The first graders did little more than stare up in awe and terror at the tall (!!) lady with the metal in her face. THEIR FEAR IS SO CUTE

Then we herded everyone into the auditorium to learn the hokey-pokey, and in return they taught us how to make little dowel-helicopter things. Like those sky dancer dolls everyone had in the late 90s, but less sparkly, and hand-powered. We also played weird Japanese dodgeball, to which the rules are just different enough to confuse American college students.

Remind me to expound later on the arbitrary nature of the boundaries between places-where-you-wear-slippers and places-where-you-wear-shoes. It was hella arbitrary.

Also, "o-gaijin-san" (literally: honorable mister/miz foreigner) is totally my favorite thing to be called, ever.

Friday! As though we hadn't done enough stuff already, Friday after class... like, right after class, to the point that we all had to pack our stuff Thursday night... we got on the bus for Izumo. Here's a map: the bus ride from Hiroshima to Izumo was four hours long, but mostly because there are no highways through Shimane prefecture.

I'd say Shimane is like Japan's Arkansas, but I don't have the same irrational hatred for Shimane that I have for Arkansas, and the Matsue-Izumo area is nowhere near as farmy, and there is no mythic history surrounding Arkansas, so really they're nothing alike. I'm not sure there is an American analogy that fits: Shimane is sort of an untamed, half-legend half-reality sort of place. Like, an Athens sort of place. Jerusalem. Utah, if you're Mormon. We read a bunch of Shinto myths for our class from the Kojiki, which is quite an old text, written in old Japanese, about stuff the kami did way back when. The excerpts we read, by no coincidence, took place near Izumo, such as the story of how Ookuninushi pulled the land of Izumo together (the secular history of it is, the two lakes near Matsue were manipulated for agricultural purposes by the ancient Japanese, rendering the previously-flooded area dry, as though someone had pulled land out of the ocean).

Friday, though, we were too tired to care about what gods were where and when. We visited the old residence of Lafcadio Hearn, a Greek guy who just traveled all over everywhere and wrote a lot of stuff about Japan, as well as a tiny museum dedicated to him. It was all rainy and miserable, and no one wanted to go anywhere, so we went straight to the ryokan (a traditional Japanese inn) after that.

The ryokan was reeeeal nice. :D There was a hot spring, and two huge meals, and the family running the place was really nice, and we played with fireworks and caught fireflies, and we got to switch roommates, and a good, naked time was had by all. Suffice it to say there aren't photos.

Saturday was the day we went to Adachi art museum and the Shimane Museum of Ancient Izumo and Matsue Castle (which I periodically spell Matsuei because that's how you pronounce it) and Izumo-taisha. Crazy freakin' day, which started at like seven. Lots of hour-long drives between places, lots of walking, lots of rushing. My legs were out of commission until yesterday because of those castle stairs...

At the art museum, I spent far too long trying to take photos of the garden, so I missed the ceramics room. /: However, I did get to see a bunch of awesomecool stuff, like lacquered writing desks and paintings from storybooks and geisha paintings and other cool stuff I wasn't allowed to photograph.

At Shimane Museum, I missed a bunch of rooms because we were rushed through, and also because one of the docents accosted a bunch of the sophomores and tried to explain some of the exhibits in Japanese to them, so I helped translate. (I carry around a step-stool, by the way, so I'm always ready to get on high horses when they present themselves.) I bought an awesome folder there with all the kami gathered to party it up at Izumo. I'm running out of papers to put in all my folders.

At Matsue Castle, I took a bunch of crappy photos with my crappy camera, and nearly ate it on the stairs no less than ten times, because you take your shoes off to enter the castle, and apparently old-timey samurai socks had more traction on them than the red ones I bought at Miyajima. Those stairs were both narrow and steep, so aargh, my legs hurt for like two days after. I did, however, get an awesome panorama shot from the top floor, because panorama mode is the one redeeming quality of my phone camera. I also watched a pretty Japanese guy stare at water striders in a puddle, and considered taking his photo. But that would have been creepy...

And at Izumo-Taisha, we saw two wedding parties and a couple other miscellaneous ceremonies, all while the main shrine was under renovation. Izumo's big for weddings. You'll notice, if you look at the photos, there's a big knot tied out front of it. The adage is the same as in English. I also acquired a little ceramic oni mask for my wall, which if it breaks on the way back, I'll be sooo sad you guys ;-;

Then we drove home for four hours, guhhhh. Then we had okonomiyaki! Yaaay!

Now it's... Tuesday night! Yesterday I went to town, and found a used clothing store, where I got a couple of awesome things my mother will hate for "is this missing a zero" type prices. I also acquired a crappy pair of fishnet tights which will break properly with wear. This is a thing non-punkygothtypes don't ever have to consider, but imagine for a moment that you're me. I plan to make them into a shirt later.

Oh, and I found this handmade perfume shop! If any one of you blog-readers ever wants an inordinate amount of my money, man, invest in perfume-making. I'm a sucker for it. >u> It smells incensey, but not at first. Also it's one of those chapstick type ones that you just rub on...

...good gracious, I'm boring...

...um. That said, I'm gonna go study now. I've decided that a C in Kajiwara-sensei's class is fine as long as I get an A in Takada-sensei's class, but getting a C in Kajiwara-sensei's class, at this point, seems like it will still require a lot of work.

Also, I promised myself I'd bleach my hair tonight, so to not have to bring the bleach home with me. Tomorrow's the Mazda factory tour, Friday karaoke, Saturday peace park. Maybe I'll try this updating thing? Maybe.

-Vic, who will be tired all of tomorrow

6/11 - I am really tired

I may have said to some of you that I would write a big, juicy blog entry tonight, but the internet here is excruciating and I am really tired, so instead I made a photos page. The link's up top, just under the title and stuff, in English and 日本語 so everyone can see it．It's full of new things!

もっと長いポストしたいけど、ここにあるインターネットはとってもおそくて、私はつかれているので、フォトページだけ作った。リンクはこの上、英語でも日本語でもある。それじゃ、みんなよめる。新しい写真はまだ入っているよ～

That said, goodnight, I'll post in the morning.

-Vic

6/5 - Suddenly, Festivals, Hundreds of Them

So! Yesterday was Toukasan, today was the Culture Jam at HSU. I have some ghastly sandal-blisters on my feet right now, so I have elected to park my rear in a chair and update.

Somehow I decided bringing my phone to Toukasan was not terribly important, especially given the tiny size of the bag I was carrying. This is probably because it was very early (Vic-time-wise) and I was not in the mindset to think of "phone" as "camera". I'm a horrible tourist. I'll steal a friend's photos at some point, and show you all. For now, you have my word that I looked awesome in my yukata. The festival was cool too, but more importantly, I wore the crap out of that yukata.

While everyone else decided to spend their money trying to win at the absolutely-rigged festival games that were there, I bought a ton of food. Now, twenty dollars' worth of festival food isn't that much, but even considering how wicked overpriced it was compared to everyday Japanese food, six dollars for eight takoyaki seems reasonable to me, who buys Japanese food in America all the time. In any case, the takoyaki (grilled octopus dumpling-things), ikayaki (grilled squid on a stick), and nikuyaki (grilled beef on a stick--this is beginning to sound like an American state fair) were freakin' awesome. Totally worth the price of like 17 ramen cups from the grocery store...

...uh. I'm gonna proceed to not think about that now.

After checking out the temple and before epic-failing at the one darts game I tried, I got my photo taken for a Hiroshima fashion magazine! HOLY CRAP, ALMOST MY LIFE'S DREAM OR WHATEVER. Sadly, I can't find the thing's website, which I'm doubting it has. All my information about it so far has consisted of skimming people's blog-blurbs about it. Anyway, I'll have to go to the bookstore at some point and see if I can't pick me up a copy of the latest issue. Getting a hold of the issue my photo might be in, on the other hand, will be more difficult... considering I have no idea when it comes out, and thus whether I'll still be in Japan then, hurp derp.

Also, later that night, the festivities moved onto Chuuou-doori, and I got to watch what was ostensibly a hip-hop dance recital, but translated to my American brain as a bunch of fifth-grade girls wearing far too little, dancing to a couple English songs that no one must have bothered translating, as they were surely "dancey," but also just staggeringly, awe-inspiringly inappropriate.

Freakin' Kesha. No, I will not spell it with a dollar sign. I was about to freakin' dry-heave, and no one would have had any idea why.

After dragging my battered and obi-choked body back to campus, I was awakened at like 8 this morning with rock music. It wasn't unpleasant, but I still rolled over and slept 'til 11 before throwing pants and jewelry on to make lunch and check out the Culture Jam, which people had been setting up for all weekend. I promptly regretted both making lunch and spending so much money on festival food the night before, 'cause the university kids definitely also sold takoyaki, but for 150 yen instead of 500. Heh. On the bright side, I have two-dollar yakisoba for lunch tomorrow, and the chicken karaage they made was ABSOLUTELY UNPARALLELED BY ANY FRIED CHICKEN DISH KNOWN TO MAN. And it was 150 yen, too.

Japanese college bands, which are way better than American ones, by the way, played right outside the Seminar House 'til like nine, and my host parents even showed up. (They heard the university Hawaiian club was gonna be playing. They assumed it would be Hawaiian music, but they feigned interest in the Hawaiian club's various rock bands, if only for my sake.)

There were a while ton of booths, some of which were selling food (like 40 percent, at least. There was homemade boba tea) and some of which had activities (another darts booth, which I didn't try this time, and an English trivia quiz, which I still did pretty badly at, for example). A bunch of the people I'd met before were happy to see me there. :D

So, yeah, now I've been doing homework for a while. I knocked out my "about Arizona" poster for the sixth-grade class we'll be visiting on Wednesday in like 45 minutes, leaving my other group members to handle the Japanese translation of the hokey-pokey. (Gerard's got my back on this, I bet: ain't no sixth-graders in no first-world country on Earth gonna be excited about the hokey-pokey.)

Baseball game tomorrow! Also, writing a paper! Good thing I've done most of my due-Tuesday homework tonight, not having any due-Monday homework to speak of. Tanaka-sensei is terribly kind that way. :P There's probably something next weekend, too, but I'll try to squeeze an update in before then. Maybe Wednesday night.

Later, adulators,

-Vic

Sidebar: How College Students Operate

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls (but especially the ladies and gentlemen, 'cause grownups don't know nothin' 'bout usss)! Time to read some Internet creep's explanation of the deep, dark inner workings of the mind of the college student!

It has come to my attention that some professors think their students get good grades because they are diligent learners who study two hours for every one hour spent in class. Thus, they get all shocked when we show weakness and look horrified at the prospect of studying the way the syllabus recommends. (A two-to-one study ratio on an 18-credit load equals like 52 hours of work per week. Meanwhile, I could do that at McDonalds every week and become hella rich, and probably also horrifically obese.)

Rather! We look at the syllabus and its neatly planned study regimen, chuckle in a "when will they ever learn" sort of way, and promptly use it to wrap our marijuana cigarettes with (you know all us young whippersnappers are on drugs, right? Just, all the time!) before proceeding to come up with our own plan.

This is how we do that:

For the first week or so of classes, or however long it takes to get a round of learning-and-homework-and-test out of the way, we wing it, basing what we do on previous classes we've taken and passed. In the case of first-semester freshmen, they either actually follow the syllabus for a week before realizing or hearing secondhand that that is silly, or base their study habits on high school and wind up crying and being driven to drink.

Then, once we've seen examples of the tests, and the homework, and the learning, we promptly filter out the things we can do fine without (that two-to-one study ratio adults love to insist they followed in college, reading the textbook chapter before the class, re-checking all our answers), thus paring our study regimen down to a sleek, manageable bare-minimum B- track. For easy classes, heck, you might accidentally wind up with an A.

This is a win-win situation, because we're getting the work that we need to do done and done fairly well, and also not missing out on the "college experience" you adults tell us is so important not to miss out on, tucked in between our 52 hours of studying a week. Shame on them.

Anyway, enough of that. I forgot to mention in my last post that my haircut is awesome, and I'll show you pictures later. For now, though, MIYAJIMA PHOTOS ARE GO.

6/2 - Can I fall into routine now please

So, more week, more class, more getting the hang of the Japanese teaching style, more despairing over lack of English grammatical analogues (I know I'm supposed to be immersed in Japanese *airquotes*, but I want to be a translator, so I'd like to know how to translate the things), more going downtown and buying nifty things.

I found bone pens, you know, pens that look like human bones, which were so cool I bought three: a femur, a radius-ulna set, and a spine. :D They came in a bag decorated for the shop's 25th anniversary, which is a clever pun in Japan, but a horrible groaner, worse than my usual fare, even, in America: it's got a big quarter on it, with "quarter century" written on it. 25 cents, 25 years... guh. See, here where their coins come in 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, and 500, the quarter is a novelty, and a matter of transcultural literacy. However cool it is, though, if I carried that bag around in America, the joke police would have me severely punished...

I also found black q-tips at the dollar store. I should not be getting all excited over things like that, but I am SO GOFFIK U GUYS and they are SO CLASSY. I will be epic sad when they eventually run out. Maybe I'll buy another pack before I leave. :V

I also got one of those neato keychains that look like wallet chains, that could probably function as wallet chains if not for the problem of girl-pockets, and the fact that my wallet has nowhere to put a chain except through the zipper. /: But it was also from the dollar store, so I regret nothing. Now, to go buy boy pants.

What else have I done lately. NOTHING OF INTEREST, is what.

Oh, I took a midterm! That's interesting in a plot-driving give-the-character-some-conflict sort of way. The financial aid arc is over, now for the Vic Is Bad At Language Immersion arc.

JK, it's not completely horrible. For instance, now I've figured out the study method I need to use (ooh, this calls for a sidebar post on how college students do things!) and also the midterm wasn't as big and scary as I thought it would be. The worst part was staring at the kanji I couldn't recognize, in sentence context, for like a full minute at a time, and still handing the test in with those questions blank. :< Poor me.

I did badly on the quiz today too, 'cause I spent all my study hours studying for the midterm! YAY

Enough of that. Toukasan is coming up (we got to hear Religion-And-Culture-Sensei rant about how the Japanese students here will tell us the festival gets its name because it's always on the 10th, which is pronounced "touka," when that is, in actuality, a line of bull, and the name really comes from the name the mountain where the nearby temple is located was given... history history, religion religion) on Friday/Saturday, and I get to strut around in my rockinawesome yukata. Then, we're going to a baseball game on Monday! For real this time!

Meanwhile, I have been eating pretty much miso soup and cup noodles (which are much better here, and also a dollar instead of 25 cents) and rice with nori in it, and have been roundly commended for using the nice kitchen we reserved for the students to cook in, while the other kids buy food out and bring it back. I AM NOT THE LAZIEST ONE HERE, AND THAT IS WEIRD

Also, I will never be able to deal with American-style lean meat ever again. Fact. Gonna have to find a neighborhood with a butcher shop. There are prob'ly carnicerias in Phoenix...

Anyway, back to video games. Er, studying.

-Vic

5/29 - Today I bought socks at a god's house

So, Miyajima was hella thrillin'. In a historical, reverent sort of way.

I took pictures, until my phone ran out of batteries. Then I took more with Roommate's camera. Eventually I'll flickr them, for your viewing pleasure! But now, it is 11 PM, and I shall only write.

I'm calling this my second and third time on a boat ever, as the first time was with my host family on that tiny river cruise (I wondered why it seemed so unfamiliar) and Disneyland definitely doesn't count. The entire trip was rainy and miserable, as it's been here for the past three days straight, I kid you not. There was a typhoon passing by that we feared would screw up our itinerary, but it wound up heading southeastier, to Shikoku, the edge just brushing by Miyajima to ruin all of our hair/socks/fun. Nonetheless, the shrine and temple (and the fog on the mountains, and the ridiculously chill deer, and freakin' everything) were beautiful. I truly need an actual camera, so next time I go somewhere I don't have to lean off the boat DiCaprio-style to snap a crappy photo of what might be the vermilion torii gate at Miyajima, if you pretend it's not just an orangey smudge.

I feel I should take more time to stress how cold and damp and horrid it was, and that I brought only one jacket because this is summer in Japan and I should be feeling more like steamed rice than cold noodles at any given time. /:

That metaphor is best taken by someone who, like myself, doesn't particularly enjoy cold noodles.

But that's boring, on to the cool stuff. We got to watch a guy play the biwa and sing verses from the Heike Monogatari, which people who didn't have other homework that week know as a semi-historical, semi-legendary account of the fall of the Taira (or Heike) clan, and I know as the basis (loosely, as cows are the basis for Taco Bell beef) for Sukiyaki Western Django, which all of you should go out and rent right now (Mom too, but only for Dad's sake). We also ate a ton of amazing food, as seems to be the norm on this trip, including (but not limited to) an eel bento that was like eating a dinner date with Jesus Himself.

And yeah, I bought socks at the shrine. Holy socks. :P

I also bought one of those head wrap things that reads "certain victory," which I will wear to Magic: The Gathering tournaments in Tempe and still look like less of a dork than most of the other competitors. I'll also wear it when cooking things. Like miso soup and french toast, as those are pretty much the only things I can cook on a whim. I'll be like a sushi chef, but with no fish or rice or... no, there's seaweed in miso soup. So I'll be like a sushi chef.

Today's over, tomorrow's the tea ceremony, which is sort of a thing I can't understand, since when I have tea it's generally an unceremonious affair. But we'll see how it goes.

I probably forgot to mention yesterday... while I was in town on Friday, trying to get my hair did, I wound up making an appointment for Monday at 3, only to find out (after the ten-minute trek from the hair salon down to the end of the street where my friends were--Hondoori is quite long) that, hurp derp, that's when the tea ceremony is. After a flurry of WHY DID YOU LET ME DO THAT and WHY DID I LET ME DO THAT, I walked back to the salon to change it to Tuesday, looking such the confused foreigner, and back-back to the end of the street again. Then I napped, lol.

WELL THAT'S THAT THEN. Wish me luck on the oral exam thing tomorrow, at some hour of the morning that American students don't believe exists.

-Vic

5/28 - A whirlwind week of wonders and wetness and... studying

Apologies for the lack of updates. Using the internet where I am is like pulling teeth out of something that doesn't have teeth.

Anyway, week! It's been full of classes! I must say it's neat to be taught Japanese by actual non-English-speakin' Japanese people, but it also makes everything ten times harder because we're mostly limited to the (stupid) example sentences in our textbooks for English analogues to the Japanese grammar structures. Also, apparently Japanese teachers have this weird tendency to give you the worksheet with the vocabulary and grammar that's going to be on the test after the test happens. That's like when you set a game on "hard" mode and it does ridiculous throw-the-console-out-the-window things that make you never want to play video games again. This has resulted in both a decline in test grades and an increase in desire to get the hell out of dodge and explore Hiroshima.

Thankfully, that's not terribly hard to do, as everyone else wants to as well.

As a result, I've done a whole lot of shopping, mostly for pants, which is a shame because I only brought like six shirts with me. On the bright side, laundry is free. Other things I've acquired include epic gifts for a) a friend of mine who likes Pokemon to a degree that occasions nausea, b) a friend of mine who likes Gackt to a degree that has led to more financial troubles than even I can shake a stick at, c) my mom (oh god I hope she likes it) and d) my little brother, whose birthday I'm missing by going on this epic soulsearching journey. But I won't say what they are, because tantalizing is my favorite brand of sadism. <3

As for inspiring jealousy (my other favorite brand of sadism), I now own a shirt from SEX POT ReVeNGe, a fact which necessitated the measuring of my steps, to avoid skipping down Hondoori. I must assure you all that IT IS SO COOL.

In news my parents (who are also, coincidentally, my only readers) might be more inclined to give a damn about, I also bought a very nice (and, regrettably, expensive) yukata to wear to Toukasan next weekend. It's definitely black and LIGHT CARMINE, which is NOT PINK, not that I CARE WHAT YOU THINK about the color of my AWESOME YUKATA THANK YOU

It has butterflies and daffodils on it, oh jeez, those are just reprehensibly girly words, huh

It's better than it sounds, really really. ._.

Also, haircut appointment on Tuesday. Be prepared to be met at the airport by a disheveled, plane-haired version of Vic From High School.

So, yes. Going to the shrine and temple at Miyajima tomorrow, come more miserable rain or fleeting, still-humid sunshine. Then you get to read more of me!

-Vic

5/22 - Mada nihongo de omotte iru yo.

So, the homestay was FREAKIN' SWEET

My roommate and I got to stay with the Tange family, a husband and wife with one adult son who lives in Tokyo, for the weekend. We ate a metric boatload of delicious Japanese food, and I took a ton of pictures. Unfortunately a bunch of them are presently inaccessible, as they're on my roommate's camera, but I'm uploading the ones from my phone and facebook as I write.

Friday was fairly relaxing; I got to eat dinner with the Tanges, visit their nephew Inoue-san's house, and have a Japanese-style bath after. Not much to say about all that, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Saturday, we spent the day in town. We went on a tiny river cruise, where we could see the famous A-Bomb Dome and a bunch of tall buildings, then went to a Japanese restaurant on Hondoori Street (Hiroshima's main street, which has a roof over it, how cool is that) for lunch, then toured Hiroshima Castle. Then, because my hair has not been behaving and thus needed chastisement, I spent like half an hour trying to communicate to a store clerk in broken Japanese that I was looking for anti-humidity serum for my hair... I wound up buying a spray-type-thing. It helps, but probably the serum would be better... maybe I'll go back and look for it, or MAYBE I'LL CUT ALL MY HAIR OFF AARGH. In any case, that's when my phone ran out of camera memory, because I'm stupid and I forget my memory card in my computer sometimes.

Sunday was also pretty relaxed. The Tanges showed us how to walk from their house to the university and back, so we can come visit them on weekends for free dinners (epic win, as Mrs. Tange is an awesome cook). We had traditional Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki for lunch (there will be pictures, soon) and went to a Japanese cake shop afterward. It was so cute ._. Then Mrs. Tange took us to a big ol' supermarket and instructed us to pick out whatever we wanted for our last dinner with them. I picked sushi, my roommate sprung for chicken nuggets and pizza. Then we returned to the university, and I wrote this blog entry, about how I'd just been on an awesome... homestay...

...no, I refuse to be caught up in this again...

Anyway! Now I am all kinds of tired, and still thinking in Japanese, which is good, actually. This blog is lovely, dark and deep, but I have a GPA to keep, and homework to do before I sleep...

Sore ja, mata ne!

-Vic

Pictures From The Arrival

So, bunch of pictures. Flew from Tempe to LA (unremarkable, but the first time), LA to Tokyo (very long, and mostly dark), and Tokyo to Hiroshima (holy crap, I got a window seat).

Since sending them all to this blog would take forever, I'm just going to caption them in the flickr gallery I've set up and direct you there. One day I'll photoshop them all nice, but for now I have ten thousand other things to do, not the least of which is to figure out how to make my hair withstand all this stupid humidity. ._. saaaad

That said, here's the gallery. I'll make a new one for each gigantic buttload of photos I take, but for smaller batches, I'll just upload them here, I think.

Now, onward to homestay for the weekend. Oh god I hope my flat-iron works in their outlet...

-Vic

5/19 - So, It Happened

Yay me, I'm in Hiroshima.

Of course, I don't have internet in my room. So, /maybe/ I'll update every day. And /maybe/ when I do, I'll be prepared.

For instance, I'm currently borrowing someone's ethernet cable because I'm stupid and forget something crucial every time I go anywhere. Luckily, it's a cheap thing to replace.

In addition to that, this means I don't have all the glorious crappy photos I took today/yesterday/the day before (time runs together when you've been awake for 24 hours spanning three different days). I'll have to run to the campus store, get an ethernet cable, run to my room, get my SD card adapter and phone (which is really mostly a camera/mp3 player/timepiece presently), and do all of that without actually running, because I don't like running.

I'm having a bit of a child-fit because we were all advised not to go into town today, despite us being a bunch of Japanophiles in Japan for the first time. I will not get sushi tonight, alas, because apparently I need to go to bed at 8 PM and (as a result) wake up at 4 AM in order to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed for my host family tomorrow night.

but explooooring. D:

Gonna go check on my minecraft servers, then run around Shudo like a crazy foreigner.

-Vic

5/17 - Leaving and Last-Minute Loans

Aaand we're back.

Everything is proceeding as planned, despite the fact that the financial aid office did that thing older siblings do where they hold out something you want, then lift it out out of your reach as you try to grab it, and make you hop impotently and flail at the thing for a while before they give it to you. I'm still hopping and flailing a bit, because I won't actually have the money until the 25th, but at least I have what little I saved, to get me through until then.

Now I'm packing things and doing a bunch of errands I probably should have done earlier, like buying a gift for my homestay family and picking up travel-size containers of shampoo and nail polish remover. As for emotions, I'm excited and nervous and freaking out still. Also, I never realized exactly what messes all my bags were, but that's not much of an emotion. More of a "human condition" sort of thing.

Gonna go dig out my Japanese character dictionary and put my wet clothes in the dryer. Wish me luck.

Not with the dryer. I'm good at that. With the trip.

5/11 - Money and Move-Out

Eww, I'm up early. For a test. Ewwww.

But, a Japanese test, so it's thematically sound, right?

I should probably be more worried about it than I am. What I am worried about, though, is Financial Aid saying they'd get my loans squared away in a week, and the fact that not only will a week from Monday be next Monday, and therefore far too close to the date I'm leaving for my comfort, but I won't be in Tempe to yell at them if they do anything wrong. Like, say, getting me the money on the 20th, while I'm in Japan, and after I've had my one stop in Tokyo.

Why, I would just fly into an implacable tiny rage. No one wants to see that.

So, let's hope the fact that I've been bugging them near-constantly about this means they've possibly realized I'm a bit concerned about money for this trip that's happening in eight and a half days.

5/4 - finals and finances

So, hello, I'm Vic, and I'm presently not in Japan at all. I'm at ASU, it's the day before finals start, and I'm varying between freaking out about a couple of my classes and the exams for them, and feeling all zen and self-congratulatory for getting all my other final projects done.

When you're a Japanese/Creative Writing major, you see, finals happen before finals week.

Luckily, the fact that I've only got 2 exams to worry about leaves me with more than enough time to despair about the financial aid office taking too long to get working on funding this trip for me. Goodness knows I don't have enough resources to do it on my own, so, like a crack dealer with his customer, they toy with me and make me wait until the absolute last second.

Hopefully they don't do like they always do fall semester. That is, take a month to get everything figured out, and then give me money for books.

If they don't hurry up, I'll be walking in next Wednesday to take out $9000 in student loans...